“Have you ever tried Indian food?”
He was standing at the stove in my kitchen and, like many of my young, male, Indian tenants before him, was cooking from the pot he’d brought with him, using the ingredients he’d brought with him, his entire family’s specter standing behind him making sure he used the correct tomatoes.
“Oh yes, I’ve eaten it my whole life, though it’s sometimes different from the home made Indian food of course.”
“Really? You don’t just eat American food?”
“There’s no such thing as American food,” I said.
He scoffed.
Here we go again, I thought. Time to smack another mother’s child with the ladle from the melting pot.
“What about pizza and hamburgers,” he smirked.
“Pizza is Italian. Hamburgers are German.”
I looked at his buffering face. Score one for the ladle. Do not scoff at your landlady, sonny.
“The only “American” food is what the indigenous people ate, things like corn and beans and fish and game and regional produce. Other than that, everything is an import. People who grow up on either coast are raised on recipes from India, China, Japan, Italy, Korea, Germany, Spain, Eastern Europe and so on. People in the middle eat more South American fare like roasted meat, barbecue and the like, though you’ll find pierogi, other “Scandi” and Viking stuff, and other culture’s dumplings all over the place, along with the pizza and burgers you’re talking about. In the south the roots go way back to Acadian and African dishes, along with native foods and fishing culture of course, which holds true for everywhere there’s water.
There is no American food.”
He turned to his onions, silent, waiting to find a way to prove me wrong. He’s been here for a couple of weeks now. He’s still waiting.
I rent the rooms on my third floor to international students who are usually in their early twenties, and while that has come with issues at times, for the most part it’s enriched my life enormously. These kids are brilliant, interesting, brave people who’ve traveled thousands of miles to be researchers, or accept a fellowship or internship, sometimes in a language they’re just learning. More often they speak many languages fluently. We have discussions about their work on tracing autism and psychological disorders in zebrafish and fruit flies; penguin bacteria, biomedical robotics and prostheses, pediatric renal transplant rejection and treatment, oral surgeries in developing nations, high-altitude aquifers, and genomics.
And then I show them how to wash dishes. Especially the guys.
The difference between the male geniuses and the female geniuses is clear: male geniuses don’t know shit, and also reject the idea that they don’t know shit. MGs are the ones most likely to start a fire, flood a bathroom, leave a door open, and leave a huge mess behind, because they have been looked after in their lives back home while they’re busy being geniuses, while the FGs have had to be FGs while also coping, more or less.
Which doesn’t mean any of them can cook. They absolutely can not. If you ever want to know if you’re a genius, cook yourself dinner. Did you burn a pan beyond repair? Did you neglect to add any seasoning at all, or add seasoning but burn it all to the bottom of the pan until the smoking herbs and spices set off the smoke detectors in the house? Does it look like food?
If the answer to the last is yes, but the first two is no, I’m afraid you are not a genius.
One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed about the male geniuses is their rigidity around food. There are exceptions of course - the Japanese medical student who told me she was afraid to eat anything prepared outside the house because she and her parents spent all their evenings watching Criminal Minds, so she knew sometimes in America people were poisoned and kidnapped and turned into sex slaves after eating in restaurants, so she’d stuff her backpack with Costco croissants and bananas each morning before leaving for work - but for the most part the FGs are game to try new things, learn new ways, and adapt. The Germans eat sushi, the Japanese eat strudel, and Turks feast on pecan pie and paella.
The guys, well… often, they want to know where to get the exact ingredients their family uses at home, and they eat the same thing every day. This is particularly annoying if it’s fried fish, like the coastal Mexican bio-mechanical genius who apparently had an entire fire squadron follow him around back home keeping his kitchen from combusting. Where could he get just the right oil? I suggested the walls and floor, where he was leaving quantities of it. The Indian MGs often want only Indian food that they make, every day, exactly the same way.
In a way I can understand it. It’s hard to be far from home, living with strangers, speaking another language, living in another country, especially this one with all its insanity.
Anyway, he’s in the kitchen now, burning another pot of rice in the rice cooker he brought 7,600 miles. The steam valve sounds like a locomotive, and soon his onions and tomatoes will begin to cook down with the spices he brought from home: cumin, cinnamon, and coriander.
It reminds me of the restaurant down the street, and the family there with their delicious, reliable menu.
Good old American food.
I’m in another course this week, so there’s no time for teaistisms.
I remember all of them well!
I’m laughing about FG and the Criminal Minds theory!
Yet our Japanese FG traveled to Iceland and other places without blinking!
The croissant memory is hilarious!
I left in the morning to a full Costco box of croissants and returned to next to nothing!
I’m dying laughing at these memories!
When I moved to London in my early 20s, I could make spaghetti, pizza, sloppy joes and not much else. My first cookbook was Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food. I needed home cooking. My friends would ask about American Food. I had no idea since what my US based relatives ate pretty much the same food as the English. I finally settled on a menu of New England clam chowder subbing mussels for the clams, cornbread, and salad.